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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Sitecore, Unity, SAP, Spotify, Nokia, Larian Studios...

European universities => SIMULA, Prolog, OCaml, Modula-2, Pascal, Coq, Agda, Miranda, F#, Java Generics, .NET Generics, Scala...

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Unity re-homed to the US. SAP is a company that inflicts itself upon the industry: it is truly garbage-tier software. Nokia is a pale shadow of what it once was. Larian, OK? They're a game studio. Spotify just annihilated its workforce.

Companies with any flex in Europe are shambolic things that prey (see SAP) on customers working in a highly-regulated industry.

ASML, Dassault, Siemens...

So much of our global computing infrastructure is outside the US that when people complain about lack of tech industry outside US, I find it laughable. I hate that tech has been reduced to only the software side, mostly because it makes a lot of money. But all the physical technology and it's innovation happens outside US, it's just not seen because they don't slap their logo on everything.

Larian outsources most of their work to cheaper countries, so they don't have to pay benefits and can boast about not doing layoffs.

All companies do that, that wasn't the question.

That list, with the exception of SAP, is everything but impressive when compared to US companies.

Even Oracle (remember them?) has a higher market cap than all of those companies combined.

any recent company though?

That wasn't part of the question, but since you ask.

https://mistral.ai/

Yeah I know Mistral, good one. its almost the only one in AI though.

They aren't the only one, there are plenty of other gold diggers trying to ride AI wave.

Just go to any European Startup event.

I like mistral very much, and this is the kind of company that is still giving me hope. However from a market size POV it is completely inexistant compared to giants like openAI, or even google with gemini.

It’s still a very very tiny and fragile company. I will be proven wrong once it reaches the hundred of millions customers, and become one the first EU tech giant since the past 25 years.

I'm talking about tech companies.

The list of tech companies you quoted, if that's the best you could find, is definitely proving my point.

Companies is not somehow the highest form of tech. Academic contributions are equally as valid. I understand we are on HN but let's not overtly glorify companies this much.

Cherry picking when proven wrong.

Or rather preventing moving goalpost. You’re citing nokia, founded in the 19th century, and SAP, founded 54 years ago, as a counter-argument to my assertion that EU isn’t good at creating tech companies. Should I have added that i was talking about the current century ?

You also talk about university and technologies created in their research labs. Which is totally irrelevant to my point.

I’m talking about the fact that EU definitely has a problem in its ability to create strong technology business and brands, and that it’s starting to become a huge problem for our economy. It was an economical statement, and you completely missed the point.

Nope, I thought you would be clever enough to fill the remaining ...

Those university research labs power many computing stacks nowadays, without which the American companies that depend on them for their existence would have had a complete different outcome going to market.

Rest assured, thanks to the way US is behaving with globalisation, if we don't get ourselves busies fighting yet another war, we might as well create The Great Wall of Europe, with Linux Desktop running on RISC-V.

There you have it, Finn technology, with a Swiss hardware consortium.

Economy as in “making profit and creating jobs”. Which those american tech companies do, and our university don’t. i’m not even sure if you’re trolling now..

If thought people got paid while working at universities, and then use that money to foster local economy.

Apparently not.

What does it have to do with AI?

He said creating tech companies. Not AI companies.

we’re talking about tech companies, see above.

anything that can do a linear regression is AI these days

Parent talked about tech companies, not "AI". If you mean companies focusing on generative AI, there's a few here, like Mistral.

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